I am Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and a Certificate candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale. My research interests center around migration and mobility, gender and state security architectures, ethics and illicit economies, bordering practices and spatial politics, and agrarian South Asia.

My doctoral dissertation, Borderland orders: Gendered economies of mobility and security across the India-Bangladesh border, follows transnational networks of kin, agrarian commerce, and contraband businesses in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh from the 1950s to the present. It explores the processes through which spaces become constituted as borderlands of nation-states, paying attention to the economies, identities, politics, and social relations that are enabled and foreclosed by dwelling in such spaces. In particular, it traces the militarization of this border, examining civil-military encounters and the gendered labour of border security practices to theorize the gendering of danger, threat, and safety that occurs at different scales. Overall, the dissertation is interested in how security states constitute themselves and the many, often intimate, ways in which they become entrenched in the everyday lives of citizens. The dissertation draws on two years of ethnographic and archival research conducted in India and Bangladesh, funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Luce Foundation, and Yale University’s MacMillan Center.

My writing has been published in Gender, Place, and Culture, Contemporary South Asia, Himal, The Hindu, and is forthcoming in the Economic and Political Weekly.